Post-Volunteer Adventures: #9 Journey Through Africa: Some of the Last Thoughts

Our small group of six has now continued its journey into Botswana. At first we were a bit nervous about the border crossing due to the fact that the border officials are known to confiscate any wood products that they find. We hid everything to the best of our ability, but there is only so much you can do to disguise a huge 5 foot wooden carving, and much less to disguise four of them. Fortunately we were quite lucky and aside for a border official who needed our help to jumpstart his car, there was no one there to search us and we made it across without any glitches. And so our drive continued.

It truly is surreal to be driving on a highway and to find oneself having to slow down and eventually stop because an elephant is crossing the road. You sort of do a double-take, shake your head, and then slowly come to realize that yes indeed, things like this do happen in Africa. Only in Africa though. The first time round you look out the window in shear bewilderment. The second time round you are still amused by it. However, by the fourth time most the people on the truck didn�t even bother lifting their noses out of their books. The sight of these gigantic beasts slowly making their way across the road no longer seemed to faze them. In my opinion, just as you can watch the sun set thousands of times or look up in wonder at the starry sky above you every night, so too, as sight such as this, does not stop to amaze. This holds true even more so when you realize that you can witness this only in Africa and nowhere else � and in my case, that means only for the next three days.

From Vic Falls we made our way to Chobe National Park were some enjoyed a morning game drive and a sunset cruise. I instead, chose to relax and pamper myself with the best shower I have had since coming to this continent. You truly learn not to take for granted such simple things as hot water and pressure greater than a trickle. This by no means is an exhaustive list of things that you start to appreciate. If I tried to write one of those I would have to include ones bed, clean towels, the ability to press down a toaster button and have toast in a matter of minutes instead of having to light a campfire, the ability to have a cup of coffee in the same time span, the existence of a bathroom within a few steps of ones bedroom, the ability to dry ones dishes without having to flap them or the need to continuously travel with a roll of toilet paper, etc. etc. But I�m sorry, I�m digressing. I truly enjoyed by day of laziness and relaxation, especially since most of it was spent on the waterfront watching all the boats pass by and the sun slowly disappear behind the horizon. However, I did end up regretting not having gone on the sunset cruise, especially considering the fact that Greg and Kate got to see hippo porn... definitively not a sight you get to see on a daily basis... but more so because of how the next few days would turn out to be.

Oh... one more digression. If you ever travel by overland truck, which I do not recommend, although I also do not discourage, insist on having an Italian tour guide. It�s like traveling with your own personal Italian restaurant. We�ve had such amazing food over the last few days!!! Mouth-watering risotto with 300g of rice allocated to each person, or beef curry on potatoes with two gigantic potatoes per person (one of which would have sufficed to feed my entire family at home). In true Italian style, everything is delicious and there is always more (much more) than enough. I think I�ve gained more weighed over these last 5 days than I have throughout the remainder of my stay here in Africa. It has been like eating out at La Terazza every single night.

From Chobe we had a longish drive day to Maun. As much as I complained about the long drive days earlier, it hasn�t been so bad recently. Ever since we�ve hit Zimbabwe there have been many more activities and much less driving � whether it would have been the two days at Antelope Park, the excursion on the houseboats, the adrenaline packed days at Vic Falls, or even the game drives in Hwange. However, even if those days had been drive-filled, it is quite a different story when you only have 6 people riding in a truck that fits 28. With four seats per person to stretch out across, a 8 hour drive is simply not the same thing and has a tendency of going by much quicker.

So a couple days ago we arrived in Maun and pitched our tents at the local campground. The next three days were to be spent in the Okavango Delta and we had been looking forward to that for quite some time now. Everything started out wonderfully. First there was a short drive to the delta�s edge, then a fantastic mokoro ride through the delta. A mokoro is essentially a dug-out canoe similar to our Canadian canoes, but a bit more narrow, much more wobbly, and made out of a hollowed out tree. Two people sit in each of these precarious-looking watercrafts and a poler stands at the back poling the mokoro forward with a four meter pole in an a-la-Venetian-Gondola style. Although the Venetian gondola guys might look a bit more graceful and might charm you with their serenades, this did seem to take a considerably greater amount of skill.

The Okavango Delta covers a total of 15,000 square kilometres and never reaches the ocean. The water merely spreads out and dissipates in the heart of Botswana creating a maze of canals and a paradise for those entrepenours who first came up with the idea of offering expensive tours into this uninhabited area. Essentially $130 US will buy you a ride out into the Delta in one of these mokoros, two nights of dusty bush-camping, a game walk where the guide has a hard time identifying the �Big Five� of Africa, and a ride back to dry land while your backside gets soaked in the overflowing mokoro... oh, and a mokoro sunset cruise (1/2 hour). I must admit that I wasn�t overly happy with this three day excursions. I loved the mokoros. I loved the sunset trip. But that�s about where the �I loved� list ends. The rest of it was a whole lot of doing absolutely nothing. Even the game walks, where we saw some zebras, a couple of wildebeests and some leopard shit, where a waste of time, especially after having had such amazing guides in Metopas and Hwange. Having someone try to explain to you what the �Big Five� of Africa are, after you�ve spent 2 months traveling through Africa is like having someone trying to teach you your ABCs after you finished university...

But yeah... the excursion would have been great had it left early one morning, done a sunset cruise in the evening, one nights worth of camping, a game walk in the morning and then a return back to camp that afternoon. Unfortunately, spread across two nights and three days it only led to boredom, complaining and an incredibly hilarious rant by Julita, which, if I tried to replicate, would be composed of a lot of **** followed by some more *?!?* and a bunch more indecipherable symbols. She�s not one to hold back on her opinion and it would be an understatement to say that she did not like the trip into the Delta.

Well, there�s not much you can do about things like that. You can�t always satisfy everyone and every now and then something will not be the way you imagined it to be or will not live up to your standards. Nevertheless, the three days in the Delta made me realize a few things. On the one hand I was surprised that it took me so long to notice them. On the other hand, having given it some more though, I�m not so surprised given the amount of quite reflection time that we had. The first of these is the size of the African sky. Maybe those from Saskatchewan or Manitoba might be able to relate, but the sky here seems to stretch for all eternity. From one horizon to the other it�s simply massive. I lay down in one of the mokoros and all I could see was blue. I do understand the concept that if there is nothing to block your view that the sky will reach from east to west and north to south, but yet somehow it�s big here; a blue dome engulfing the world. I might have to visit you Lindsay in Saskatchewan to compare � but somehow I have a feeling that Africa is different.

The other thing that crossed my mind is the beauty of being able to lie in your tent, listening to the hippos grunt in the background, hearing the frogs croak in the grass as the mice scurry round the tent and out of your little window being able to gaze up at a star filled sky. Just as the endless blue of the day takes your breath away, so too does the vast night sky. We�ve travelled significantly further south, so unfortunately you can�t look up at the sky and see both the southern-cross and the big dipper, but there definitively is no shortage of constellations. Whether it would be Mars, Jupiter, Scorpio, Orion or even the Milky Way � I could go to bed looking up at them every single night � even if I did have to keep on sleeping in a tent.

Oh... and for the last while, although I�ve been talking about the beauty and charm of Africa, it is not the same Africa as further up north. We no longer feel like a truck-load of mzungus; no longer feel like a minority that stands out no matter where we go; no longer feel like a tourist whenever we walk into a shopping-center; no longer need to be wary (for some) of eating local food... Although all of Africa was at one point or another colonized, there are many more remnants of it in the southern part. There are many more whites � descendents of the former colonial settlers. The infrastructure, especially for Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa, is much more developed and better maintained. It is a setting in which we, the �white people�, feel much more comfortable in. It is not the Africa that is truly African � although that Africa, the Africa which I would really want to get to know and explore, we merely drove through and never got to see except out the window of our truck. Well, there are ups and downs to this... some might prefer it, and for some it�s only preferable sometimes. But it is the way it is... and it is where I am and where I�m heading... and I�m rambling nonsense, so I will stop.